Ariah (55 page)

Fahmi laughed. He fingered a thick jacket I’d knitted of undyed yak wool. “You’ll do the mending, though, eh?”

“
Did he tell you about Shayat?”

“
Oh, sure.”

“
Her father is a tailor. She’ll do the mending.”

“
Which makes you what?” Fahmi asked. “Just a pretty face?”

I read him just a little, just to see if there was anything to worry about behind those words. There was nothing there but curiosity, but it made me nervous nonetheless. I drank my tea. “I suppose so. Hand of djah?”

“
Always,” Fahmi said.

Winter came and went. Spring came and went. That next summer was brutal, and I lost one of the yaks. I wept. I was morose. I had grown very attached to that yak. I sold the saddle to Fahmi for a pittance. The Droma are a people who see omens everywhere, and I must have spent enough time with them to pick up the habit, because my dead yak struck me as a bad sign. Three weeks after the yak died, Sorcha rode into Zaghir. So much for omens.

He came at dawn. He rode the three hundred miles from Essala on that horse, as fast as he could. His horse was half-dead when he got to Zaghir, and none of the pirates were surprised he’d treated it like he had. They’d seen him do it before. He came to Zaghir in the early morning, just after dawn, and knocked on Fahmi’s door for water and a place to sleep. Fahmi sent him to me.

He knocked on the door of my yurt. I woke slowly, disgruntled. I opened the door, bad-tempered, half-convinced it was my yak rubbing against the yurt to shake loose the last bits of her undercoat. And there he was. He stood before me as close to shy as I’ve ever seen him. He looked sheepish and boyish and uncertain. He grinned wide, though, and I could feel the happiness bursting from him. He was there, in one piece. He’d found me, and I’d found him. I threw myself at him, pulled him tight against me. I breathed in his smell and felt his hair against my cheek. I never wanted to let him go. Sorcha took my face in his hands and kissed me. It was soft at first, but grew hungry. Unbridled and desperate. I lost myself in half a second and came to again next to him in the yurt, naked, deliriously happy. He studied me when I came to; there was a trace of worry about him. “You all right? Was that all right?” he asked.

“
I’m all right.”

“
I should’ve held back, though. Should’ve checked.”

“
I’m all right.” I drew him over to me, and he tucked his face into my neck. He breathed a long sigh into me, and said my name, and I laughed at the pleasure of hearing my name in his voice again. “I love you,” I said.

“
I love you, too.” He laughed and held me tighter. “Oh, how I’ve missed you.”

I played with his hair. Bright red hair, now with streaks of silver at the temples. “I can’t believe you looked for me.”

“
I did more than that. They locked me in jail for three months in Ma-Halad when I went searching for you. They thought I was an accomplice for your breakout.” He laughed. “You deserted the Qin Army. That general, the Butcher? Oh, that got right under his skin.”

“
They threw you in jail?”

“
Shayat got me out.”

“
She was with you?”

Sorcha pulled away just a little and propped himself up on an elbow. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Right. Ah, you’ve missed so much. She and I, uh…me and Shayat, we’re…we’re, uh, hitched.”

“
Married?”

“
Yeah. Got hitched in lyairo. Easier travel to come get you. Helped to get me out of jail, too. And then, we…well, we stayed hitched. Been together all this time. Is that all right with you? It just happened, you know, me and her.” He sighed and looked me in the eye. “When I say we’re hitched, I mean I love her. A lot. Deep and true, like with you. That sit all right with you?”

I confess, it took me by surprise. “I…how long?”

“
Well, like I said, we hitched pretty soon after the army took you. So, nine years. Getting on ten.” He stole a glance at me, then turned his attention to the weave of the blanket we lay on. “As for the rest, me and her…well, you know, I won’t speak for her. Just me. As for me, that didn’t take all that long. Been sprung on her now for six, seven years.” He looked back up at me, searching me. “But, you know, I been looking for you all this time. A dozen years I been looking for you, Ariah. I hope that says something about us.”

“
It does.” I ran a hand down the length of his arm. I looked down the length of him and drank in the sight of him. “I was all right with it in Rabatha.”

“
Well, it was different in Rabatha,” Sorcha said. “It was sex and friendship, me and her, but it wasn’t love. And sometimes, you know, the shift from one to the other can be tricky for other folks involved.”

I lay close to him. I moved so we were pressed together, forehead to forehead, toe to toe. I had him there. In that moment, it felt like nothing could go wrong anywhere in the world. “I’m fine with it if she is.”

“
She is.” He kissed me, and then stared at me hard.

“
There’s more.”

“
A bit, yeah,” he said. He sighed. He drummed his fingers on my arm. I noticed, for the first time, the pirate tattoo on his neck and the fleet mark on his chest. With skin as dark as his, you can barely see them. With skin as black as Shayat’s, you don’t see them at all. You only know they’re there if you run your fingers over her skin. I thought he was going to tell me he was a pirate. He didn’t. “Me and Shayat, it’s not just me and her. We got twins.”

I leaned back away from him. “Twins?”

“
Yeah. Little girls, just over four now. Mayim and Ishkallion. Got my hair, her eyes. Beauties.”

“
You have children?”

“
Yeah.”

I rolled onto my back. “She was always very careful with me.” Sorcha didn’t say anything. I found his hand and held it. “Tell me about your girls.”

“
Our girls. Yours, mine, and hers. Ah, they’re…they’re troublemakers, you can already tell. Sneaky little buggers. They’ve hidey-holes all over the house. They got their own language, just a private tongue ’tween the two of them. Smart as whips. Maya’s the brave one. Ishie watches everything.”

“
You have children together. And a house.”

“
We do, yeah.”

I burned with questions, and the questions bred doubt. Sorcha and Shayat had built a life in exile, a full life with toddlers and jobs and doors with hinges that needed to be oiled and windows that stuck in the frames. And I was in a yurt with a yak. It seemed such a perfect thing on its own, their life. Something fragile. A balance I wanted very much not to upset.

Sorcha curled up around me. I felt the slow rhythm of his heart against my chest. “Come home with me,” he said.

“
Are you sure?”

“
I been searching high and low for you. I joined a pirate fleet to find you, and so did Shayat. Come home with me.”

And I did.

HOME: AN EPILOGUE

Sorcha and I made the trip to Essala as soon as his horse was ready. He rode his horse, and rather than sell my yak to Fahmi, I rode the poor thing all the way there. It was slow going, but the trip gave Sorcha and I time to talk, time to relearn each other, time to figure out what was still the same and what the years had changed. He loved my hair; it reminded him of his da’s. He made me promise night after night not to cut it. I’ve kept that promise. A Nakash ship waited in the Essala harbor for us. We were in and out of the city in the blink of an eye. I barely had time to say goodbye to the yak, much less get captured by the Qin police.

The Nakash clipper was manned by a crew of full elves, many of whom were mostly silver. Some were born in Essala and had joined the ships rather that stand in a factory line. The captain of the ship was a friend of Sorcha’s; they’d started as crew at the same time and helped each other up the ranks. She gave me passage on her ship without demanding affiliation and let us stay together in the vacant tether’s cabin next to her own. I didn’t realize at the time how generous this was of her. I was still wary of the pirates then, even though Sorcha was so thoroughly one of them, and I rarely left that cabin. He rarely left it, either. There’s not much for a fleet recruiter to do on a ship full of fleet members. He told me about his time on the ships. He traced over the scars I’d gotten in the desert, and I told him about the Avolayla and the Allunga and the Kivvni. I told him about Halaavi. Laavi and I made as little sense to him as Sorcha, Shayat and I made to Laavi. Every conversation ended in sex. Sometimes I stayed shaper, and Sorcha wondered why. Sometimes I drank pirate rum and remembered everything. I was grateful for every second of it.

We ported in Alassah. The Nakash mostly sail the southern swells, and they do not have much of a hold that close to the coast. In Alassah, Sorcha and Shayat are the Nakash fleet, and they are respected. Sorcha led me along the maze of floating piers, which make up the docks. I wore a lefta and no shoes, a Droma transplant through and through. The island is narrow, long and winding like a sea snake, and the buildings are built tall along skinny streets. After years in the open grasslands, it felt horrifically claustrophobic. Sorcha held my hand in plain sight in the street, and no one batted an eye. He walked tall, nahsiyya at a glance, and was not remarkable. I trailed behind him, fighting an urge to sing a walking song to these arrogant buildings. I knew it was absurd, but it seemed rude to enter the city without one.

We turned down an alley, and then another. A pack of children chased a chicken our way, shoving by single file to get past us when it ran through Sorcha’s legs. Sorcha frowned at them. “Hey, whose chicken is that?”

“
Not yours, Fiddler, promise!” one of the children yelled back.

Sorcha shook his head. He counted his chickens later that night to make sure it wasn’t one of his. His grip on my hand tightened as we walked down that narrow street. I felt his heartbeat ratchet up through his palm. We came to a bright blue house with a white door. In the window hung a length of muslin with the twined Nakash serpents twined painted in black. Sorcha fished a key out of his pocket and led me inside.

Shayat stood in a doorway across the room with her back to us. Her short, white hair shone in the light. Her hips had a regal sweep to them. I gripped Sorcha’s hand tight. He smiled at me and laid his other hand against my arm. “Shayat,” he said. It came out low and lilting, half song.

She started. Toys clattered in the next room. She turned, already smiling, and froze. “Ariah,” she whispered.

“
I found him.”

Shayat slammed into me with enough force that I fell against the door. “You’re here,” she said, “you’re really here.”

“
I’m here.” She turned and looked at Sorcha. Her face in profile brought everything rushing back. “You look lovely, Shayat.”

She turned to me again and laughed. She plucked at my hair. “You look ridiculous! This hair? The beard? What are you wearing? You look like you’ve wandered the wilds.”

“
I did.”

“
I know!” she said, grinning, her hands on my cheeks. “You look it.”

I kissed her. She let it be soft, gentle. She let it be sweet. For me, she let it be sweet. When we broke apart, she looked over at Sorcha. “Did you tell him?”

“
I did. Of course I did.”

“
Do you want to meet them?” she asked. “The twins know all about you. We’ve told them all about you every day. They want to meet you.”

“
Yes,” I said. “I want to meet them, too.”

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the lovers I have and will have, to those I had and lost, and to those who, in my stubbornness, I didn’t name as lovers in time.

About the Author

B R Sanders is a genderqueer writer who lives and works in Denver, CO, with their family and two cats. Outside of writing, B has worked as a research psychologist, a labor organizer, and a K-12 public education data specialist. B has published another novel set in the Aerdh universe,
Resistance
, and has published several fantasy and science fiction short stories
.
B blogs about reading and writing fiction at brsanderswrites.com.